Valamity!

Just a little.

I’m not sure whether to commend myself for retaining some little bit of the child in me, switching off the light switch and dashing like mad back into the covers where the monsters can’t get me. Not that I ever thought of it in terms of monsters. I never put a face on whatever I was that was scaring me so because, because, you know, it was the faceless things that scared me. The unknown. Werewolves and vampires and ghosts, that’s silly. I was more afraid that maybe the pinpricks of fear in my back would turn out to be a man with a knife poking me experimentally before he jammed the thing between my ribs.

Walking alone in the dark still makes me a little uneasy. Especially if there’s wind. That whistling wind, you know, that sounds like someone is trying to scream but just can’t so they went with the closest approximation their throat could manage. Something like that.

For some reason a man using his index finger to smear pollen into his thumb keeps flashing in my mind. I wonder what that’s about. How strange that pollen is flower sperm. The sweet scent of reproduction..

I’m just going to ramble about things now.

Would the world be a better place if Jerusalem could be wiped off the map entirely? If it had never existed. No more fighting over some damn “holy” city…No crusades, no fighting in Israel…Why did everyone decide to put so much religious importance on this one city? Why couldn’t every religion just have a nice little city of its own? Do the Hindus even have a city?

Were I a prophet, my city would be Wabash, Indiana. The first town to be lit with electricity, and the capital seat of Wabash County (as well as my heart).

I’ve been learning to play the guitar! Okay, not really. I’ve wanted to play the guitar for all my life. Actually, funny story…I used to have this fake guitar with fake plastic strings that I used to love, and I forgot that I ever had it for a long time. Then, when I was 16, my mother mentioned at some point that I had always wanted to play the guitar, and I sort of blinked and thought “I did?” and then I thought about it more and I realized “hey, yeah, I do” and it sparked a three month long obsession with the owning and playing of guitars. I even wrote an insane short story that I don’t have anywhere on my laptop or my external hard drive that went into a guitar related tangent for awhile. The line “I bought a guitar yesterday. Not to play, just to have.” appeared. I’m not sure what I meant about that, but I think it was just my acknowledgment that I am interested in them but know I will never be any good at playing them. Alternative meanings that appeal to me: virginity (especially because guitars are such fabulous phallic symbols), the hypocrisy of image, and the romantic idea of how your imagination is always better than the real thing.

Anyway, I never actually did anything about my simmering guitar-love until lately, but my roommate has a guitar that I’ve fiddled with (wow, that expression loses a lot of oomph when you’re referring to a musical instrument) a total of three times now. I can half-remember a few chords and I think a half-callous on my index finger, but that’s about all I have to show for it. Leila has been trying to teach me, but we’ve discovered that I have no sense of rhythm, beat, timing or key, and I know just enough about music to know that I don’t know anything at all. I found an online tutorial that’s supposed to be teaching me how to play America’s Horse With No Name, my all time favorite song that I started liking when I heard it as a song snippet from a Saturday morning infomercial. Mister Bojangles would be number two.

I miss Saturday mornings.

I want to read a book about the Crusades now. Leila wrote a long paper about the Crusades one time. I wonder if she still has it…

I think the 50s are fascinating. I want to know so much more about everything.

Here’s a music video.

That’s all for now.